A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1995 Berkley Books Before his untimely death on October 1, 2013, the late Tom Clancy wrote 16 best-selling novels which focus on many aspects of America's national security community. Starting with his now-classic The Hunt for Red October (1984) and continuing all the way to his final Jack Ryan novel (2013's Command Authority ), Clancy's cast of characters included soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and special operations troops, not to mention a certain CIA analyst who eventually becomes President of the United States. All of these books - including Red Storm Rising, one of only two novels that are not set in Clancy's "Ryanverse" - are not only successful because they tell great stories, but also because they are the result of a lot of research and Clancy's ability to network with many people in the military and other branches of government. In addition to his works of fiction, Clancy wrote a seven-book series of non-fiction bo

(C)  1994 Berkley Books Before his unexpected death on October 1, 2013, Tom Clancy wrote 19 novels, 17 of which were set in what reviewers and his legions of fans refer to the "Ryanverse" (so-called because they feature either his central character, John Patrick Ryan, Sr. and a large supporting cast that includes his son Jack Ryan, Jr.). Most of those novels were best-sellers; including The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising (the only best-seller that was not set in the Ryanverse), and the last Jack Ryan/Jack Ryan, Jr.  books he co-wrote with Grant Blackwood and Mark Greaney between 2010 and 2013, In addition to his works of fiction, Clancy also wrote many non-fiction books about various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, including the seven-book "Guided Tour" series that began with 1993's Submarine: A Guided Tour of a Nuclear Warship and ended with Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces  (2001).  These books were co-written with res

A Mk. 48 ADCAP torpedo is about to make a Soviet Kresta II cruiser's day very, very bad in this screenshot from a session of Red Storm Rising.  (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd. I've owned quite a few personal computers since the mid-1980s. My first one, an Apple II, was a gift from my late father's older brother Sixto; I remember it fondly because, you know, it was my first real computer. It was the most expensive of all the PCs; with its Imagewriter II printer and color monitor, it cost my uncle $2100 plus whatever the sales tax was in 1987. It was not my first choice; the computer that I'd really wanted to get was a Macintosh, but when my uncle asked the sales rep at Computer Village how much that one cost, the reply was a cool $3200. My uncle said that was a bit too pricey, so I ended up with an Apple II, which was my second choice. (I already used them in my college campus' Apple Lab, so I was familiar with them and liked them well enough.

In the mid-1980s, after the late Tom Clancy became a “name brand’ author with two back-to-back best-selling novels ( The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising ), it seemed as though a platoon of new writers who specialized in military-themed fiction emerged seemingly from thin air. Soon, book stores were seemingly full of late Cold War-era novels which featured stories featuring characters similar to Clancy’s CIA analyst Jack Ryan or focused on military themes and scenarios in which Soviet and American forces faced off against each other in various parts of the world. Because these stories described modern weapons, their effects, and their use in great detail, the publishing world – much to Clancy’s dismay – even came up with a new sobriquet for the military fiction genre: technothriller and anointed the former Maryland insurance salesman as its master scribe .   Among this new crop of writers who specialized in technothrillers was Harold Coyle, a graduate of the Virgi

(C) 1987 Presidio Press Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover.  Although it is thematically similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises escalate into an all-out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received, permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two "speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story. Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the

Pros:  Fine performances by Baldwin and Connery. Cons:  Movie-wise, no. See review for quibbles. One of the things I've learned about screenplay writing is that adapting a book, particularly a popular novel, is not always an easy task. Syd Field's book, Screenplay , devotes an entire chapter to the subject of adaptation. Field points out, and I am paraphrasing here, that novels and screenplays are two different forms of writing. Each has its own rules and each one differs vastly in purpose.   A novel, for instance, is meant to be read by a large audience and each reader can read it at his or her own pace.   Screenplays, on the other hand, are the blueprints for the making of movies. Both tell a story, and if a novel is being adapted into a screenplay, often the same story. I offer this caveat because many Tom Clancy fans often feel that movie versions of their favorite novels often disappoint them. Scenes and characters - even entire subplots and/or adversari